Energy and Climate

One of the biggest challenges for humankind is to transform the current economy to a low-carbon economy. It is going to transform businesses and industries, including yours. We help organisations adapt to the low-carbon economy by choosing the right focus and making sure that you treat sustainability as a strategic and not an operational challenge.

Aiming to meet high ambitions for sustainability – but how?

In the low-carbon economy, your business will look different. Your supply chain will be affected, your clients will ask for different products and services, and chances are that you have taken new technology and a set of new competences in use.

Insights like these are becoming mainstream. But we experience that it is less evident exactly how the transformation of organisations is going to become a reality. To realise your green ambitions, we support you in considering some of the important questions like: How should you position your products and brand? What happens if you invest ahead of time? And is there a second-mover advantage?

If you want to avoid the risks and exploit the opportunities from the transition, incremental measures will not be appropriate for meeting fundamental changes. Therefore, we help organisations in their pursuit to become sustainable by supporting them in:

• Understanding the real impact of their activities and the scope for change in the supply and demand chain
• Making clear choices about the desired position and decide how to measure success
• Creating the behaviour that will make the transition happen

We support you in choosing the right scope

The sustainability agenda spurs irrational debates, sometimes highlights problems with high visibility but little consequence, or leads organisations to develop solutions which have more impact on communication than on the actual sustainability of our ecosystems.

In our experience, many organisations could benefit from a better map to navigate the green transition. Here, it is essential that you establish a baseline in order for your organisation to make clear sustainability choices. Yet, establishing this baseline itself requires a number of choices – choices that we are accustomed to facilitating.

For a typical production company, 5-10% of the carbon footprint stems from own on-site activities. The rest of emissions are linked mostly to suppliers and their suppliers. When helping you establish your baseline, we support you in navigating the choices, i.e. whether you should also consider things like the downstream climate impact – the carbon footprint created by your customers using your products. We know that for some companies this may be the most relevant component of a sustainability strategy – in a decarbonised economy, low-impact products will be in highest demand – while for others, this question might be a mere distraction from what really matters.

In addition, there are several standards and protocols for tracking and reporting carbon footprint and for tracking improvement. To establish a useful baseline, we find that it pays off to assess the future use of the baseline and reporting: Will our clients require us to declare the carbon content of our products in future? Will we be providing sustainability data (such as ESG ratings) to lenders to reduce the cost of capital? Should we design KPIs primarily to support our own strategic transformation or align with international standards for transparency?

To us, sustainability is a strategic and not an operational challenge

To reach the Paris target of a temperature increase well below two degrees Celsius, we will need to rapidly change the way we produce, transport and consume products. The change will create numerous opportunities but will also make physical and immaterial assets obsolete.

It is our deepest belief that this target will not be reached through incremental improvements, and impact on the business environment will not be incremental either. Therefore, we argue that taking a risk and an opportunity approach are a great way to start strategic thinking about your green transformation – asking yourself questions like:

• How would a carbon-neutral world look from the perspective of my organisation?
• Which opportunities appear in different scenarios, and which assets are stranded?
• What do we need to change to pursue the most attractive positions and to make the most of our potential for creating positive change?